An immersive weird Florida art gallery is opening in Tampa — and it will include a brewery

Tampa Bay is the home to numerous great art exhibits and museums, but none are quite like Crab Devil. This Florida-inspired weird, wild, immersive art gallery is set to open in Ybor Heights at the beginning of 2021. In addition to interactive exhibits and subversive pieces of art and writing, visitors can also enjoy a local onsite brewery. 

Crab Devil is “an immersive arts attraction imagined as a family-friendly cabinet of curiosities ripe with kitsch, bizarre history, and fantastical lore showcasing Florida at its most weird and wild” according to the website. 

Visitors will first enter the Crab Devil Bait shop, a kitschy roadside establishment filled with unique oddities that relate to Tampa’s history and culture.

Guest will next tour the 25 experiential, hands-on shipping containers brimming with sensational Floridian wonders. Don’t worry, they are all air-conditioned to combat the Florida heat.

Exit through the museum. At the end, guests are encouraged to explore the attached museum where they can discover more peculiar treasures that capture the essence of Florida. Sunshine, sea salt, sponges, Skunk Apes, and slithering pythons.

The inspiration for the gallery came from “Tampa’s history as a port city and center of maritime commerce.”

Crab Devil’s main exhibit, “The Peninsularium” is constructed with “an assemblage of repurposed shipping containers harkening back to the traveling circuses of the early 1900’s.”

So, what does this all add up to? The organizers put it like this: [Crab Devil] is cooler than a museum, smarter than a theme park, weirder than a carnival.

Best of all, they are looking for unique artists to submit their work for the show. You can apply for your work to be showcased HERE

After experiencing for COVID related delays, Crab Devil is expected to open on an acre of land at 3800 N Nebraska Ave. in Ybor Heights in early 2021.